I want to hold on to that image of him, from those months, because of what came later.

That was the real Ethan.

The one who held his sister’s hand so she wouldn’t have to be afraid.

I have to keep reminding myself that man was always in there, even on the day he seemed to disappear entirely.

That is, I think, the hardest and most necessary discipline in loving anyone through the worst thing they ever do: to hold, at the same time, both the person who did the terrible thing and the person you have always known them to be, and to refuse to let either one erase the other.

It would have been easier, in a way, to let the man in the delivery room become the whole of my brother — to file him under monster and be done, to let one afternoon rewrite thirty years.